Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotes

And with such fictions we are willing to ruin a human life!

The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

I do not rebel against my God, I simply do not accept his world.

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind.

Avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself.

Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.

Because you're lukewarm, not hot or cold, you'll spill out of my mouth like vomit.

What does a decent chap talk about with the greatest possible pleasure?
Answer: about himself.

After his brother. He suddenly noticed that Ivan swayed

I understand only too well why Russians with means have all made tracks abroad ... If the ship is about to sink, the rats are the first to desert it.

Truly great men must, I think, experience great sorrow on the earth.

Reality alone justifies everything.

Life is, and death is not at all

Sometimes she put that question to her husband, and, as usual, she asked it hysterically, threateningly, expecting an immediate reply.

In any case, you must remember, my dearest, that the main strength of innocence is innocence itself. farewell.

Let us become servants in order to be leaders.

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

I grieve for my little son, father, for my little son.

And it was not that he seemed to have forgotten or intentionally forgiven the affront, but simply that he did not regard it as an affront

In place of dialectics, life had arrived.

Now, I know myself, I am annoyed, I shall loose my temper and begin to quarrel, and demean myself and my ideas.

Do you know, my dear Sir, the position of a man who has nowhere to go, and yet has to go somewhere?

If Stavrogin believes, he does not believe that he believes. And if he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe.

In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilt for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.

If we're to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face
love vanishes.

And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.

He could not pass by children without his soul being shaken: such is the man.

The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?

What's more certain than anything is that your pity is even stronger than my love!

One can't hold one's tongue when one has a feeling, a tangible feeling

You will behold great sorrow, and in this sorrow be happy.

People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.

Actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at that moment that all this was out of Pushkin's Silvio and Lermontov's Masquerade.

I feel pity for him, and that is a poor sign of love.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering ...

Made one feel one was confronting a man who never doubted of himself. He

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid - and I know they are - yet I won't be wiser?

I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

You have to be all too basely in love with yourself to write about yourself without shame.

If God thought it necessary to offer rewards for love, your God must be immoral.

The prince took off his tin cross, Parfyon his gold one, and they exchanged them.

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

A special buffet would be opened at the end of a suite of rooms, and Prokhorych (the head chef at the club) would be in charge

the punishment inflicted for these peccadilloes.

Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

The servants used to say, 'he read himself silly,

The formula 'two and two make five' is not without its attractions.

Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.

Is it not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?

Where's the bit about Lazarus? he asked.

Listen, Kolya, by the way, you are going to be a very unhappy man in your life ... But on the whole you will bless life all the same.

he will certainly tell some lie to save appearances.

Who fears the wolf should never enter the forest. What?

Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.

He could do nothing but twist his moustache, drink, and chatter the most inept nonsense that can possibly be imagined.

People are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.

Money is a kind of freedom that can be felt and heard; it is an inestimable treasure for a man entirely deprived of true liberty.

I am too young and I've loved you too much.

Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?

I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is.

In order to judge a man, one must first observe him more closely.

But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and even swagger over them?

When God will chastise a man, He first of all deprives him of his reason ...

I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful hatred-that hate which is only a hair's-breath from love, from the maddest love!

FYODOR MIKHAYLOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of a physician's seven children. When

In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.

In a word, many flattering things were said of them. But there was some criticism. People spoke with horror of the number of books they had read.

And you and I had better go work on the land. I want to scrape the earth with my hands.

I believed, I believe, I want to believe, and I will believe

You ache with it all; and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache.

( ... )man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice- that is an axiom.

It was more difficult not to
understand than to understand.

For the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now
that it has failed ... (Everything seems stupid when it fails.)

Pass on by us and forgive us our happiness

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

He had a distant sense that all this optimism was also morbid

For the whole world to vanish into thin air, or for me not to drink my tea? I say, let the world perish if I can always drink my tea.

Oh I've plenty of time, my time is entirely my own.

I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment. Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.

The greater the power, the more terrible its responsibility.

How good life is when one does something good and just!

I just said it for the beauty of the style.

very acutely conscious

You don't need free will to determine that twice two is four. that's not what i call free will

For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it still follow the Christian ideal.

Heavy burdens are not for everyone, for some they are impossible ... These are my thoughts, if you need them so much.

Let me be accursed. Let me be vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is shrouded.

Reason is passion's slave, is it not?

Father,' he asked, 'are rich people stronger than anyone else on earth?' 'Yes Ilusha,' I said, 'there are no people on earth stronger than the rich.

And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

Indeed, precious memories may remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is precious.

I don't need you to tell me I'm not well, though I don't really know what's wrong with me; I think I'm five times healthier than you are.

Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you that it's not true and that it's blushing now just as I am blushing all over.

And in fact I've noticed that faith always seems to be less in the daytime

Man is bound to lie about himself

The prince says that the world will be saved by beauty! And I maintain that the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love.